Chapter 3 — Old Book Repairer In A Small Alley

The next morning, Lam woke up before dawn, made a pot of tea and waited until the first sunlight shone through the window before taking the book out of the locker. She wanted the best natural light, the clearest mind, and most importantly, she wanted to do this alone, without anyone standing next to her making her hands shake.

She rearranged the tools on the table in the same order she had used many times with other books, but today her movements were much slower, more careful. Before starting, she also did something she had never done with any book before: took out her phone, took pictures of every angle of the book, noted the time, noted the original condition — like a kind of scene record, even though she had no idea what scene she was recording.

The spine lining is deep inside, under the fabric cover that was removed yesterday. Lam uses a thin bamboo stick with a flat tip, a specialized tool used to separate sticky paper without tearing, and gently inserts it into the edge of the lining. The glue here is different from the glue covering the outside cover - thinner, seems to be applied more carefully, only glued at the edges and not spread out, as if the person who made it intentionally left the inside part to be easily separated if someone knew how.

That thought made Lam pause for a moment. A normal bookbinder would never apply glue that way — it's not secure, it's not technically optimal, and the spine will get weaker over time. There's only one reason why people do this: they want the insides to be able to be retrieved later, either by themselves or by someone else who knows.

She continued to work, slowly, patiently, millimeter by millimeter. After nearly half an hour, the outer spine lining peeled off completely, revealing what lay underneath: a stack of paper folded into quarters, pressed flat against the spine frame, the paper had turned yellow-brown over time but was still surprisingly intact, thanks to being tightly pressed and completely isolated from air and light for sixty years.

Lam's hands were really shaking at this moment, no longer the usual feeling of nervousness. She put down the bamboo stick, took a deep breath, wiped her hands on her apron even though her hands were not dirty, then used two fingers, gently as if touching a butterfly that had just landed, to remove the stack of papers from the spine.

The stack of papers was thicker than she expected, consisting of many thin sheets of polyurya paper, a popular type of letter-writing paper in the past, turned ivory-colored, carefully folded into layers. Lam spread them out on the clean lining, holding his breath as he watched the handwritten words appear in the sunlight — the handwriting was italic, soft but decisive, the blue ink faded but still largely legible.

The first page is not a letter, but a poem, handwritten, with a carefully underlined title: "Loc Ben Smoke and Mist". Lam read through it, his heart pounding. That is the opening poem of the poetry collection of the same name, the most famous poem, quoted in textbooks, recited in countless poetry performances over the past sixty years. But this manuscript differs from the printed version in a few sentences and a few words, like an incomplete draft version, with deletions, corrections, and overwrites.

At the end of the poem, there is not the signature "Ung Boi Chau" as in the printed book, but two small words, written in italics, somewhat more timid than the poem above: "Thuc Hien".

Lam sat still, still holding the paper in her hand, her eyes reading those two words over and over as if reading them many times would turn them into names she was familiar with. But they don't change. Thuc Hien. A name she had never heard of in any literary documents, never seen mentioned anywhere related to Smoke Suong Lac Ben or Ung Boi Chau.

She turned to the next page. It was still poetry, the same handwriting, also signed with Thuc Hien's name, some of the poems were identical to those in the printed poetry collection, some others she did not recognize, perhaps never published. In the corner of a few pages, there are small dates: "Tra Lang, September 1963", "Tra Lang, February 1964" — all at least one year earlier than the official publication year of the poetry collection, 1965.

On the eighth sheet of paper, the content changed. It's no longer poetry, but a letter, written in the same handwriting, in the same ink. Lam read slowly, word by word, as if afraid that reading quickly would miss something important.

"Mr. Tuyen,

I sent you some newly written articles, please save them for me like always. My father still hasn't calmed down, saying that no daughter from a good family would do such poetic things to make people gossip about her name. I didn't dare to argue, I only dared to secretly write at night. After writing, I didn't know where to put it for peace of mind, for fear that my father would find it and burn it all like last time.

You are the only person I can still trust. Your words may never be known to anyone, but at least I have you to keep them for me, rather than letting them disappear like they never existed.

Thuc Hien."

Lam put the letter down, his hand shaking so much that he had to put it on the table to hold it. "Mr. Tuyen" — could not be anyone other than her grandfather, Khuc Van Tuyen. This woman named Thuc Hien, around 1963 or 1964, sent her handwritten poems to her grandfather to keep, because her family did not accept a girl writing poems publicly.

And those poems, at least in part, coincide with poems in the collection Smoke Suong Lac Ben — a book published in 1965, under the name of a man named Ung Boi Chau.

Lam sat quietly for a long time, trying to sort out the pieces of information that had just come to her mind. She is not an in-depth student of literature, but she knows clearly that Smoke Suong Lac Ben is one of the poetry collections considered classic, taught, and mentioned in most research works on modern poetry in the Tra Lang region. Ung Boi Chau, although he passed away in 1998, is still a big name, associated with a large publishing house run by his descendants.

If what she was holding in her hand was real — if this manuscript really did predate the printed version, really had the same content, really was signed by someone else — then it was more than just an interesting historical discovery. It was a bomb that could blow away the entire foundation of a celebrated literary career spanning six decades.

The familiar sound of limping footsteps echoed from inside the house. Lam was startled and instinctively quickly covered the stack of papers on the table with a cloth, a gesture that she herself did not understand why she did - her father was not an outsider, there was no reason to hide it from him. But perhaps, deep inside, she felt that this was something directly related to him, to her grandfather, to a part of family history that she needed to understand better before showing it to her father.

Mr. Vinh walked out and sat down as usual in his familiar chair. He looked towards the desk and saw that the book Smoke Suong Lac Ben had been completely disassembled, the cover in one place, the insides in another, and a cloth covering one corner of the desk. His eyes stopped at that cloth for a long time, longer than when he looked at the book.

"Dad," Lam said, her voice trying to stay calm but unable to hide the trembling, "I found something in the spine of the book. Handwritten poetry. With a letter. Signed by someone named Thuc Hien, sent to grandpa."

Mr. Vinh said nothing. He just sat still, his hands clasped together on his thighs, his eyes looking down at the floor, and Lam realized his shoulders were shaking - not shaking because of illness, but shaking because of an emotion too great to suppress, an emotion that had been buried for many years and was suddenly revived by just a few old papers.

"Dad knows about this, right?" Lam asked, his voice lowered. "Dad, do you know who Mrs. Thuc Hien is?"

After a long time, Mr. Vinh looked up. In his old eyes, Lam saw a complex light that she had never seen before - both relief because someone finally touched this secret, and fear because she didn't know where or how to start, with the little vocabulary left after the stroke.

He grabbed his notebook and pencil and wrote, more slowly than usual, as if each word weighed heavily.

"Grandpa's. Secret."

Then he stopped, looked at Lam, and wrote another line, the line that made Lam's heart stop beating for a beat.

"Dad. Don't. Know. Over."

Her father—who had lived with her grandfather for nearly forty years, and who had inherited the entire bookstore and profession from him—didn't know the full story either. He only knew enough to be afraid, enough to keep his distance from that box of books for so many years, but never knew enough to understand the whole truth.

That means if Lam wants to know who Thuc Hien is, what happened between her and her grandfather, why her poems are in a book under someone else's name — she will have to find the answer herself, starting from scratch, with just a few old sheets of paper and a name as her only clue.